phonemes. If two phonemes can occur in the same environment and distinguish meaning, they are in phonemic contrast.
55. tone: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords.
56. minimal pair: When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two words are said to form a minimal pair.
V. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give ex-amples for illustration if necessary:
57. Of the two media of language, why do you think speech is more basic than writing?
1) In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing.
2) In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed.
3) Speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue, and writing is learned and taught later at school.
58. What are the criteria that a linguist uses in classifying vowels?
1) Vowels may be distinguished as front, central and back in terms of the position of the tongue in the mouth.
2) According to how wide our mouth is opened, we classify the vowels into four groups: close vowels, semi-close vowels, semi-open vowels, and open vowels.
3) According to the shape of the lips, vowels are divided into rounded vowels and unrounded vowels.
4) The English vowels can also be classified into long vowels and short vowels according to the length of the sound.
59. What are the major differences between phonology and phonetics?
They differ in their approach and focus. Phonetics is of a general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they possess, how they can be classified. Phonology, on the other hand, is interested in the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.
60. Illustrate with examples how suprasegmental features can affect meaning.
1) The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning, such as `import and import. The similar alternation of stress also occurs between a compound noun and a phrase consisting of the same elements. A phonological feature of the English compounds is that the stress of the word always falls on the first element and the second element receives secondary stress, for example: `blackbird is a particular kind of bird, which is not necessarily black, but a black `bird is a bird that is black.
2) The more important words such as nouns, verbs adjectives , adverbs,etc are pronounced with greater force and made more prominent. But to give special emphasis to a certain notion, a word in sentence that is usually unstressed can be stressed to achieve different effect. Take the sentence “He is driving my car.” for
example. To emphasize the fact that the car he is driving is not his, or yours, but mine, the speaker can stress the possessive pronoun my, which under normal circumstances is not stressed.
3) English has four basic types of intonation, known as the four tones: When spoken in different tones, the same sequence of words may have different meanings. Generally speaking, the falling tone indicates that what is said is a straight-forward, matter-of-fact statement, the rising tone often makes a question of what is said, and the fall-rise tone often indicates that there is an implied message in what is said. 61. In what way can we determine whether a phone is a phoneme or not?
A basic way to determine the phonemes of a language is to see if substituting one sound for other results in a change of meaning. If it does, the two sounds then represent different phonemes. Chapter 3：Morphology
I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. Morphology studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.
2.Words are the smallest meaningful units of language.
3. Just as a phoneme is the basic unit in the study of phonology, so is a morpheme the basic unit in the study of morphology.
4. The smallest meaningful units that can be used freely all by themselves are free morphemes.
5. Bound morphemes include two types: roots and affixes.
6. Inflectional morphemes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories such as number, tense, degree, and case.
7. The existing form to which a derivational affix can be added is called a stem, which can be a bound root, a free morpheme, or a derived form itself.
8. Prefixes usually modify the part of speech of the original word, not the meaning of it.
9. There are rules that govern which affix can be added to what type of stem to form a new word. Therefore, words formed according to the morphological rules are acceptable words.
10. Phonetically, the stress of a compound always falls on the first element, while the second element receives secondary stress.
II. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given: 11. M ____ is the smallest meaningful unit of language.
12. The affix “-ish” in the word boyish conveys a g____ meaning.
13. B______ morphemes are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word. 14. Affixes are of two types: inflectional affixes and d____ affixes. 15. D______ affixes are added to an existing form to create words.
16. A s______ is added to the end of stems to modify the meaning of the original word and it may case change its part of speech.
17. C______ is the combination of two or sometimes more than two words to create new words.
18. The rules that govern which affix can be added to what type of stem to form a new word are called m____ rules.
19. In terms of morphemic analysis, d____ can be viewed as the addition of affixes to stems to form new words.
20. A s____ can be a bound root, a free morpheme, or a derived form itself to which a derivational affix can be added.
III. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
21. The morpheme “vision” in the common word “television” is a(n) ______. A. bound morpheme B. bound form C. inflectional morpheme D. free morpheme
22. The compound word “bookstore” is the place where books are sold. This indicates that the meaning of a compound ______.
A. is the sum total of the meaning of its components
B. can always be worked out by looking at the meanings of morphemes C. is the same as the meaning of a free phrase. D. None of the above.
23. The part of speech of the compounds is generally determined by the part of speech of _______.
A. the first element B. the second element C. either the first or the second element D. both the first and the second elements.
24. _______ are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word.
A. Free morphemes B. Bound morphemes C. Bound words D. Words 25. _____ is a branch of grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.
A. Syntax B.Grammar C. Morphology D. Morpheme 26. The meaning carried by the inflectional morpheme is _______.
A. lexical B. morphemic C. grammatical D. semantic 27. Bound morphemes are those that ___________. A. have to be used independently
B. can not be combined with other morphemes C. can either be free or bound
D. have to be combined with other morphemes.
28. ____ modify the meaning of the stem, but usually do not change the part of speech of the original word.
A. Prefixes B. Suffixes C. Roots D. Affixes
29. _____ are often thought to be the smallest meaningful units of language by the linguists.
A. Words B. Morphemes C. Phonemes D. Sentences 30. “-s” in the word “books” is _______.
A. a derivative affix B. a stem C. an inflectional affix D. a root IV. Define the following terms:
31. morphology 32. inflectional morphology 33. derivational morphology 34. morpheme 35. free morpheme 36. bound morpheme 37. root 38. affix
39. prefix 40. suffix 41. derivation 42. Compounding V. Answer the following questions:
43. What are the main features of the English compounds? 44. Discuss the types of morphemes with examples.
I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: l.T 2.F 3.T 4.T 5.T 6.T 7.T 8.F 9.F 10.T
II. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given: 11. Morpheme 12. grammatical 13. Bound 14. derivative 15.Derivative 16. suffix 17. Compounding 18. morphological 19. derivation 20. stem III. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
2l.D 22.D 23.B 24.B 25.C 26. C 27. D 28. A 29. B 30. C IV. Define the following terms:
31. Morphology: Morphology is a branch of grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.
32. inflectional morphology: The inflectional morphology studies the inflections 33. derivational morphology: Derivational morphology is the study of word- formation.
34. Morpheme: It is the smallest meaningful unit of language.
35. free morpheme: Free morphemes are the morphemes which are independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves or in combination with oth-er morphemes.
36. bound morpheme: Bound morphemes are the morphemes which cannot be used indepen-dently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word.
37. Root: A root is often seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself al-though it bears clear, definite meaning; it must be combined with another root or an affix to form a word.
38. Affix: Affixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional affixes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories, while derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word.
39. Prefix: Prefixes occur at the beginning of a word . Prefixes modify the meaning of the stem, but they usually do not change the part of speech of the original word.
40. Suffix: Suffixes are added to the end of the stems; they modify the meaning of the original word and in many cases change its part of speech.
41. Derivation: Derivation is a process of word formation by which derivative affixes are added to an existing form to create a word.
42. Compounding: Compounding can be viewed as the combination of two or sometimes more than two words to create new words.
V. Anwser the following questions:
43. What are the main features of the English compounds?
Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between. Syntactically, the part of speech of a compound is determined by the last element. Semantically, the meaning of a compound is idiomatic, not calcu-lable from the meanings of all its components. Phonetically, the word stress of a compound usually falls on the first element. 44. Discuss the types of morphemes with examples.
Free morphemes: They are the independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves, for example, “book-” in the word “bookish”.
Bound morphemes: They are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word such as “-ish” in “bookish”. Bound morphemes can be subdivided into roots and affixes. A root is seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it has a clear and definite meaning, such as “gene-” in the word “generate”. Affixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphemes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories such as “-s” in the word “books” to indicate plurality of nouns. Derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word such as “mis-” in the word “misinform”. Derivational affixes can also be divided into prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes occur at the beginning of a word such as “dis- ” in the word “dislike”, while suffixes occur at the end of a word such as “-less” in the word “friendless”.
Chapter 4：Syntax
I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. Syntax is a subfied of linguistics that studies the sentence structure of language, including the combination of morphemes into words.
2.Grammatical sentences are formed following a set of syntactic rules.
3. Sentences are composed of sequence of words arranged in a simple linear order, with one adding onto another following a simple arithmetic logic.
4.Universally found in the grammars of all human languages, syntactic rules that comprise the system of internalized linguistic knowledge of a language speak-er are known as linguistic competence.
5. The syntactic rules of any language are finite in number, but there is no limit to the number of sentences native speakers of that language are able to produce and comprehend.
6. In a complex sentence, the two clauses hold unequal status, one subordinating the other.
7. Constituents that can be substituted for one another without loss of grammaticality belong to the same syntactic category.
8. Minor lexical categories are open because these categories are not fixed and new members are allowed for.
9. In English syntactic analysis, four phrasal categories are commonly recognized and discussed, namely, noun phrase, verb phrase, infinitive phrase, and auxiliary phrase.